Liopic on Tech – Page 10 – software engineering for evolved monkeys

You can even find “plants 2.0”

While my plants grow and grow, and are eager to the arrive of summer, Rubén told me about a website, a la 2.0, to keep track of your gardens and plants: My folia, where I’ve created my garden profile. There are too few people at the moment, so the magic of 2.0 doesn’t work still. And I’m not sure about their business plan (if they didn’t build it for fun).

Anyway I found it interesting as a place where I can investigate the growing process of a 2.0 website. I’m preparing the launch of my own website 2.0, focused on strategy turn-based games, so every single detail I can observe in other places could be interesting.

ImageWorth: Mix your songs with pictures

Last week I’ve been quite busy. I had a small project in mind. Briefly, the idea is to search pictures that match the songs you are listening to. And present them with some visual beauties.

I named this project as: ImageWorth, try it out!

It gets the “recent listened tracks” list from your Last.fm account, and for every song title it searches for pictures on Flickr. And uses Javascript with JQuery library to show them smoothly.

Regarding the inside: I strongly used Javascript for making it happen (I wanted to practice some js programming). There is a PHP part, which is basically a proxy to let AJAX call directly to Last.fm and Flickr, but it’s quite simple. The heavy work is done in the Javascript lines, which were quite interesting to develop. This time I used only Object-Oriented programming, and this leads to some (a priori) weird things in js. This language has its own way to work with objects, with a lot of flexibility, but this flexibility leads you to keep more things in mind. For example, when you want to bind a function (which is an object in js) to an even, without losing the reference to the original object (this) where you did the binding on. It’s not easy at first, but when you start to understand how it works, the beauty of closures and the incredible amount of possibilities it means… you start to love it.

By the way, any comment about ImageWorth? I hope you like it!

“Hello World!” is too hard to program

10 years ago, when I saw for the first time a Java program, the classical “Hello World!”, I thought for a moment “booo, it’s counterintuitive… you need to create a class just to say Hello”. Later I used to do all the nasty work with classes.

But I never imagined something like the following:

Malbolge, invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, is an esoteric programming language designed to be as difficult to program in as possible. The first “Hello, world!” program written in it was produced by a Lisp program using genetic algorithms.
– from Malbolge description

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A PDA with Linux

I’m used to read PDFs while in bed, on my Acer PDA. But its tiny resolution (320×240) didn’t help a clear reading, therefore I started to look for a bigger device, it must be easy to hold but not too big. So I avoided those e-readers, and focused on PDAs with bigger resolution. And then I stumbled upon a Nokia 770 review… it is supposed to be a “Internet tablet”, but the thing that caught my attention was its screen resolution: 800×480. Luckily I have a friend who owns one, so I had a look at the device… it was interesting indeed.

I thought “Ok, I can use a N770 to read PDFs, and my Acer n50 for the rest of things (do sudokus, see pictures and record Go games)”… because I read some comments on Internet saying “it’s just a web browser, not a really PDA” (really?). I found a offer on ebay, and bought it for just 102 euros.

What a machine! The default factory configuration was a bit short of features (I reinstalled the lastest OS), but then you configure some program repositories, start to add open source applications, and discover the real power. The OS is a version of Debian. This means you can have an xterm with most of the usual commands. Moreover the graphical system can hold GTK-based programs with an easy porting. I installed some games, CGoban to record Go games, and some utilities (including a Last.fm player).

The cons are that its CPU (252 MHz) is too slow, so sometimes it stops to respond for a while; and the battery lasts less than a normal PDA (actually, similar to a laptop, around 3~4 hours). So its a device for patient users (or if not, try its successor, the N800 and N810, with double speed CPU and webcam).

I can even play a game of Freeciv!

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